I am fairly new
to Twitter, so as a naïve newcomer I’m perhaps excessively discouraged by a
dialogue
of the deaf recently begun by the following tweet by the conservative Christian
writer Rod Dreher:
Liberal: "You admit Trump is awful, but
you're still considering voting for him over 'religious liberty.' That's so
trivial, given the enormity of his badness!" Me: "If it's so trivial,
then give us what we want. You'll get our votes, or at least Trump won't."
Liberal: [silence]
That elicited a long conversation: 94 responses within 17 hours. (Perhaps a lot of people had time on their
hands while the turkey was in the oven.)
There was a tendency to regard
Dreher’s concerns as a demand to harm gay people.
Dreher’s tweet is actually an olive branch to the left: he
understands how grotesque it is for Christians to be supporting this hateful, cruel,
stupid, evil man, and is looking for a way to make it stop. Comment threads are often dumb, but this one
seems to me to accurately represent the hostile response he will get from many
of my fellow leftists.
I fear that many on the left don’t understand how endangered
religious conservatives feel as a result of the growing success of the gay
rights movement – a movement I’ve been part of for more than thirty years. The cases where conservative Christians have
been held liable for discrimination feel to them like an existential
threat. They fear that the law will treat them
like racists and drive them to the margins of American society. Were their fears exaggerated? A majority of the
U. S. Commission on Civil Rights declared that proposals for religious
accommodation “represent an orchestrated, nationwide effort by extremists to
promote bigotry, cloaked in the mantle of ‘religious freedom,’” and “are
pretextual attempts to justify naked animus against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and
transgender people.” Pretextual: the
assumption is that they don’t really believe what they say, that they pretend
to believe it as an excuse for hatred.
I
know enough conservative Christians to be confident that this is nonsense. There is, of course, a
certain charm in the suggestion that our adversaries know they are wrong and
are just pretending to disagree with us because they are horrible people. The
labeling of their views as “pretextual” seems to rely on the idea that no one
could really believe this stuff. But
that notion evades the familiar problem of religious diversity. Other people’s
religious beliefs often seem obviously bizarre to us.
The
gay rights/religion issue has been a disaster for Democrats. If Hillary Clinton had received Barack
Obama’s 2012 percentage of the white evangelical vote in Michigan and Florida,
she would have won. She made no
effort to reach those voters, evidently thinking that there was nothing to
talk about with them. It’s not clear
that any of the current leading candidates for the Democratic presidential
nomination will try to do that either.
Trump’s
message was that Christians needed to suspend their moral compunctions about
him (and his flagrantly authoritarian policy proposals) because they were
endangered. In the Republican primaries,
white Evangelicals rejected their coreligionists in favor of someone who
promised to be a tough guy, and then remained loyal to him even after he was
caught on tape admitting to sexually abusing women. “There is an assault on Christianity. . . .
There is an assault on everything we stand for, and we’re going to stop the
assault.” Only the ruthless use of
political power could save them: “We’re
going to protect Christianity, and I can say that. I don’t have to be
politically correct.”
Surely
it is possible to make
some kind of deal that
accommodates these voters’ perspectives and fears. I explore that possibility in my next book,
forthcoming this spring from Oxford: Gay Rights v. Religious Liberty? The
Unnecessary Conflict.
Trump’s
support among conservative Christians is inherently fragile. Secular liberalism and conservative
Christianity alike condemn lying, cruelty, poverty, oppression, and prejudice. They need to unite against their common
enemies. But before they can do that,
they need to end this war.